House impeachment managers delivered opening remarks during the US Senate trial into Donald Trump and his dealings with Ukraine, as Democrats blasted White House attorneys for presenting Fox News-style “histrionics" at the hearings.

Democratic impeachment manager Adam Schiff ​argued in his opening remarks the president's "misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box" and suggested that Americans "cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won" in 2020 after Mr Trump encouraged Ukraine to launch political investigations into one of his Democratic rivals, Joe Biden.​

House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, another impeachment manager, also accused Republicans of “voting for a cover-up”, observing: “Only guilty people hide the evidence.”

The prosecution's marathon opening statements included clips from witness testimonies and, most damning, from the president himself, including his admission that he would accept politically damaging information on a rival candidate from a foreign country and would ask China to investigate the Bidens.

House impeachment managers, acting as the prosecution, each handled a different aspect of the charges against the president and the players involved, from Rudy Giuliani's influence and direction under the president to pressure Ukraine into an investigation, to the on-the-ground consequences of withholding military aid to Ukraine while it was in the middle of a ground war with Russia.

All the president's lawyers: The team fighting Trump's impeachment

All the president's lawyers: The team fighting Trump's impeachment

  • 1/6 Alan Dershowitz

    Dershowitz is a controversial American lawyer best known for the high-profile clients he has successfully defended. Those clients have included OJ Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. One longtime Harvard Law associated told the New Yorker Dershowitz "revels in taking positions that ultimately are not just controversial but pretty close to indefensible."

    Getty

  • 2/6 Ken Starr

    Starr became a household name in the 1990s as the independent counsel who led the investigation that led to Bill Clinton's impeachment. That investigation began as a look into a real estate scandal known as Whitewater, and eventually led to impeachment after Mr Clinton lied under oath about having an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

    AP

  • 3/6 Jay Sekulow

    Sekulow is the president's longtime personal attorney, and, now, personal lawyer in the White House. He has been accused by former Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas of being "in the loop" during the Ukraine scandal.

    Getty

  • 4/6 Pam Bondi

    Bondi is the former attorney general in Florida, and a longtime backer of the president's. She made a name for herself in Florida for taking hyper partisan stances on issues, and her penchant for publicity. She is likely to be a prominent public-facing figure during the trial.

    AFP/Getty

  • 5/6 Pat Cipollone

    Cipollone is the White House counsel, and leading the president's defence team.

    Getty

  • 6/6 Rudy Giuliani

    While not officially named as one of the president's impeachment lawyers, it is hard to ignore Giuliani's outsized role in this process. The former mayor of New York has been making headlines for months as he defends his client, and for his apparent role in the effort to compel Ukraine to launch the investigation into Joe Biden. We'll see how he figures in the actual trial, which he has said he would like to be a part of.

    Reuters

Looking on from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the president fired out dozens of retweets in support of his cause while insisting he was “making great progress” at the global summit, as a new poll makes bleak reading for his supporters ahead of 2020.

The president appeared to acknowledge his administrations' participation in the obstruction charges against him by telling reporters: "Honestly, we have all the material. They don't have the material."

He also falsely claimed that Democrats leading his impeachment "don't talk about my conversation" with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenksky and that "they don't talk about my transcripts" that the president believes exonerate him.

Follow live coverage as it happened: